An organization having multiple telephone stations often uses a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) for routing an incoming call from a caller, e.g., a customer, to, for example, a sales agent of the organization. FIG. 1 illustrates a conventional calling center 10 employing a PBX system for automatically routing incoming calls. As shown in FIG. 1, for any particular call placed from a customer telephone 15, there may be a human intervenor (operator) 20 who answers the call and sends it into the PBX switching system 25, which automatically routes the call to a particular call center agent 30. Alternatively, if an agent is not available, call-routing algorithms may be employed to appropriately queue an incoming call, estimate the waiting time before an agent will be free to receive the call, and route the call to the next available agent when it is at the head of the queue. Various statistics regarding incoming and outgoing calls may additionally be collected.
While sophisticated, the conventional use of a PBX to route incoming calls leaves much to be desired from the point of view of caller satisfaction. Oftentimes, the first agent to whom a call is routed does not handle matters of concern to the caller and the caller must be transferred to another agent. Sometimes more than one transfer is required. Furthermore, each transfer is often accompanied by an additional waiting period while the intended transferee agent is busy on another call, or until it is determined that the intended transferee agent is otherwise not available.
In an attempt to provide better service to callers, many automated answering services allow a caller to either directly select whether to be routed to a particular agent, e.g., by dialing an extension number or agent's name, or to wait for the next available agent. Some such answering services even announce the estimated waiting time. Additionally, in a further attempt to ease the burden of establishing the right connection, U.S. Pat. No. 5,428,608 describes a call connection technique whereby a first caller utilizing a modem that is capable of providing simultaneous voice and data communication service through a public switched network, may establish a voice connection based upon the user's data connection. Thus, a controlling device may be able to automatically establish a voice connection between a caller and an agent as determined from the context of the established data connection, i.e., the activity of the application that the user is currently engaged in. This technique, for example, is useful in the "on-line" home shopping systems.